I’m not going to spend a great deal of time on this because the story is just affirmation and takes away from research and value-added discussion. Tonight Fox News is reporting on the efforts of Senator Mark Warner to make secret and off-the-record contact with Christopher Steele in March of 2017. Warner, a rabidly partisan Democrat, is the minority Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Majority Chairman is Richard Burr (R-NC) and also corrupt as hell. Not surprisingly, Burr is covering for Warner. –You can read the STORY HERE–

Anger-driven social movements do not moderate themselves, but they all eventually run into obstacles and begin to decline. #MeToo may be entering a new phase as stories like the following proliferate. The #MeToo movement has been very, very good to California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, providing a national profile for the ambitious solon: In December, when Time magazine announced that “Silence Breakers” who spoke out against sexual harassment were its Persons of the Year, Garcia’s face was prominently included in the art accompanying the cover story. (snip) But suddenly, the hunter has become the hunted, as Carla Marinucci writes in Politico Daniel

BRONX, New York City -- More than 100 public defenders -- attorneys for people who can´t afford lawyers -- walked out Thursday in protest of their clients getting detained by federal immigration officers. The civil disobedience happened at the courthouse in the Bronx, with the attorneys saying Immigration and Customs Enforcement has adopted new standard operating procedures under President Donald Trump. "I don´t know what to do right now," said Zaquera Lanier, whose husband was taken away before her eyes. "I don´t know what to do. I don´t know what to feel right now." Dembele Lanier had showed up for

Big Government: Nothing brings together the two political parties in Washington like a bill that lets them spend more taxpayer money. Just look at the back slapping going on after the Senate agreed to a budget-busting bill. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell crowed about how the Senate leadership "worked hard to find common ground." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer added that "I believe we have reached a budget deal that neither side loves but both sides can be proud of. That´s compromise. That´s governing." If this budget agreement is what passes for governing in Washington, we´d like to see less of it, not

Russia Scandal: Bit by bit, piece by piece, the growing scandal of the FBI´s spying on the Trump campaign is being revealed for what it is: an effort to weaponize the federal intelligence bureaucracy for use by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Recent revelations point to former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and a secretive group of supporters and hangers-on both inside and outside of the FBI and Justice Department as having a far deeper personal involvement in the investigation than first thought. Fears of a politicized and manipulative "deep state" are looking less paranoid by the day. The involvement

WASHINGTON — The Latest on Congress and spending legislation (all times local): 5:30 a.m. The House has narrowly passed a sweeping bipartisan budget accord, ending an hours-long government shutdown and clearing a path for huge spending increases for both the Pentagon and domestic programs. The 240-186 vote sends the $400 billion spending plan to President Donald Trump, who has promised to sign it. Passage of the measure came over the opposition of Democratic leaders who demanded the promise of a vote to protect “Dreamer” immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. A band of tea party Republicans swung against the legislation as

All of a sudden and from out of nowhere, since it’s February and not much else to do, Ireland has decided that it’s time to pick on the Jews. The Senate over there has been on the verge of passing a bill making it unlawful to buy or sell anything from Israel’s “territories.” You could get fined and/or imprisoned if, say, you are caught purchasing a golf club from the “West Bank.” Same punishment if you bring back juicy oranges from Ariel. That measure, which got widespread support within the Parliament, has been set aside, for the time being. It’s been put on hold

(Snip for opening graphic) We´ll bring you Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel´s tweetstorm in a moment, but I´ll take a stab at answering her question about the media right out of the gate. Three possibilities: (1) The GOP hyped the Nunes memo, which quickly became the center of this whole firestorm -- replete with counter-memos, FBI objections, etc. The press followed the spotlight. (2) As we´ve been saying, there are so many complex pieces of this larger puzzle, following the plot is difficult. It´s not just news consumers wondering, "which memo is this now?" -- it´s many of the

One of the most remarkable takeaways from the new documents released in the Trump-Russia investigation is the degree to which FBI officials were determined to believe dossier author Christopher Steele — even after it became clear he had lied to them. In their drive to win a warrant to wiretap sometime Trump volunteer Carter Page — along with Paul Manafort, one of only two Trump figures known to be wiretapped in the investigation — the bureau rested most of its case on Steele´s information, and the officials who filed the warrant application seemed resolved to believe Steele even after his

Someone has to get former FBI director James Comey to stop tweeting. Ever since Comey revealed his anonymous Twitter account last October, he’s displayed a weird and disconcerting side of his personality on social media that can only be described as emo James Comey.(Snip)It’s easy to scoff at this treacly stuff, but what’s really unsettling is the disconnect between Comey’s carefully crafted public image of an upright public servant and the details now emerging from the ongoing congressional investigation of surveillance abuse at the FBI and Department of Justice. Ever since President Trump fired Comey last spring, the mainstream media

New York City police ignored all 1,526 requests from federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain undocumented immigrants for up to 48 hours last year, a top NYPD official said Wednesday. The Daily News reported that Oleg Chernyavsky, the NYPD´s legislative affairs director, revealed the numbers at a City Council meeting. The number of requests for 2017 was nearly 20 times higher than the 80 the department received over the previous year. Chernyavsky said the department responded to just two of ICE´s 2016 requests because those immigrants had federal arrest warrants. Under New York City law, prisoners can only

Team Hillary, which includes the corrupt and seditious hierarchy of the Obama DOJ and FBI, actually thought they could get away with everything. Hillary would win, Trump would be in the dock, and they would get away with everything from using the Clinton Foundation as a corrupt pay-for-play cash cow, to lying to the FISA court to conduct surveillance on American citizens, to real collusion with the Russians to transfer to them 20 percent of the raw material for nuclear weapons, our uranium supply. Certainly we would have never heard of one William Douglas Campbell, the FBI informant with extensive

There are a couple of articles, one at the New York Times and the other at Reuters, which are required reading for anyone who isn’t aware of perhaps the greatest American economic victory in recent times. There was a War for Oil, for the benefit of our friends who remember fondly the protests from the previous decade, and we won — without firing a shot. We’ll borrow a bit from the Times to offer the gist… A substantial rise in oil prices in recent months has led to a resurgence in American oil production, enabling the country to challenge the dominance of Saudi

After years of non-stop virtue signaling as the party of "truth, justice and equality," the Democrats are slowly, inexorably being revealed to be the reverse. They are being hoisted on the petard of their own moral narcissism. It has made them blind. So convinced of their own righteousness were they that it allowed them to participate in, even instigate, the subversion of our justice system to the extent of lying to and deceiving a FISA court in the name of what they assumed was "good." They did this in concert with people who claimed to be Republicans or "independents" working for

Federal authorities scrambled to redact and keep classified key information revealing major abuses of the U.S. surveillance apparatus that targeted President Donald Trump´s associates in the lead up to the 2016 election, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation who said the latest information corroborates findings recently made public by House Intelligence Committee officials. On the heels of the release of a classified memo by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee disclosing that the FBI relied heavily on a widely discredited anti-Trump dossier to carry out unwarranted surveillance on Trump allies, Senate investigators this week made public their own findings

The NYPD got a whopping 1,526 requests from the feds to detain immigrants in President Trump’s first year in office — and rejected them all, officials said Wednesday. The number of detainer requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement was nearly 20 times higher than the 80 requests received in 2016, NYPD legislative affairs director Oleg Chernyavsky told the City Council. In 2016, cops complied with two of the 80 requests to turn over undocumented immigrants who got arrested to the feds for deportation. New York law says the city can’t hand prisoners over to ICE unless they’ve been convicted of one of 170

Washington stumbled into another federal government shutdown at midnight Thursday, after GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky refused to allow a vote on a bipartisan budget deal before the funding deadline. It’s the second shutdown in three weeks. The only question now is how long it lasts. Shortly before 2 a.m. on Friday, the Senate voted 71-28 to pass a bill to reopen the government. The House will need several hours to finish work on the measure and pass it, if Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) can overcome opposition from House Democrats. “What makes Democrats proudest of this bill is that after a decade

Two ISIS fighters notorious for imprisoning and murdering Western hostages were captured on the battlefield in Syria in January, according to three U.S. officials. The men were part of a group of four jihadis dubbed the Beatles by observers because of their British accents, and were caught by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish and Arab militia fighting both ISIS and the Assad regime. (snip)The four men tortured their hostages, according to U.S. officials, and are linked to more than two dozen beheadings. Emwazi was suspected of killing Americans James Foley and Steven Sotloff.

American aircraft carried out retaliatory strikes in Syria against forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, U.S. officials said. Syria´s state-run SANA news agency reported that the bombing left dozens of people dead and wounded. NBC News could not immediately confirm that account. No embedded U.S. troops were believed to have been wounded or killed in an earlier attack targeting a headquarters of the American-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, U.S. officials told Reuters on condition of anonymity. The SDF is an alliance of militias in northern and eastern Syria.

Sen. Rand Paul speaks about the spirit of why he is holding up the passage of the budget deal through the Senate: SEN. RAND PAUL: When the Democrats are in power, Republicans appear to be the conservative party. But when Republicans are in power, it seems there is no conservative party. You see, opposition seems to bring people together, and they know what they´re not for. But then they get in power and they decide, we´re just going to spend that money too. We´re going to send that money to our friends this time. The hypocrisy hangs in the air and chokes anyone

WASHINGTON— The government stumbled into a midnight shutdown Thursday as a rogue Senate Republican blocked a speedy vote on a massive, bipartisan, budget-busting spending deal, protesting the return of trillion-dollar deficits on the watch of Republicans controlling Washington. A shutdown — technically a lapse in agency appropriations — became inevitable as GOP Sen. Rand Paul repeatedly held up votes on the budget plan, which is married to a six-week government-wide spending measure. The Senate recessed around 11 p.m. with plans to reconvene just after midnight.Paul was seeking a vote on reversing

District officials in Duluth, Minnesota, schools have removed "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" from the required reading list because of racial slurs in the books, CBS Minnesota reports. Michael Cary, the district´s director of curriculum and instruction, told The Duluth News Tribune the books will still be optional reading and available in the school libraries, but they´ll be replaced next year by other books that touch the same topics without language that makes students uncomfortable. "We felt that we could still teach the same standards and expectations through other novels that didn´t require

Seoul, South Korea - The plane carrying a high-level North Korean government delegation including leader Kim Jong Un’s sister has arrived in South Korea to attend the opening ceremony of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. Kim Yo Jong will be the first member of North Korea’s ruling family to set foot in the South since the 1950-53 Korean War. The North Korean officials during their three-day visit beginning Friday will meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who’s trying to use the Olympics as an opportunity to pull North Korea into meaningful talks over its nuclear program.

Ever watch one of those games in which it looks like the road team is inadvertently doing everything it can to give the game away but the home team is too inept to capitalize? Welcome to the “Trump-Russia” investigation and the pro-Trump media’s coverage of the latest “stunning” revelation: a text in which two top FBI counterintelligence officials discuss the fact that the president “wants to know ev erything we’re doing.” This has much of the conservative media crowing: The text, commentators exclaim, shows that Obama lied four months earlier when he claimed — hilariously, to be sure — that

Los Angeles - The struggling Los Angeles Times found a local savior in a biotech billionaire willing to buy the storied newspaper from a corporation half a continent away, but the change of ownership brings its own set of questions and uncertainty. Patrick Soon-Shiong agreed to pay $500 million and assume $90 million in pension liabilities for the Times and San Diego Union-Tribune, Tronc Inc. announced Wednesday. The news was met with a mix of optimism and skepticism by those who have seen the fourth-largest circulation newspaper in the country plagued by cutbacks and circulation declines and roiled by leadership changes in

Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, chair of the Legislative Women’s Caucus who has been at the forefront of the movement against sexual harassment in the state Capitol, has herself become the subject of allegations of sexual misconduct. The Bell Gardens Democrat said she would “participate fully” in an investigation. Politico reported Thursday that two men said Garcia made improper advances toward them. One, a former legislative staffer, said Garcia groped his back and buttocks and attempted to grab his crotch during a legislative softball game in 2014. The former staffer, Daniel Fierro, told his former boss,